Critical Essay by Erica Harth

[One] of the principal questions of Les Mandarins is whether or not literature is possible for the politically committed writer. (pp. 177-78)

[It] was Simone de Beauvoir who discovered alienation as the specific anguish of the French writer during the years of the Algerian Revolution. As the number of massacres and tortures mounted in the mid-fifties, she was to experience for the first time the sense of being an exile in one's own land…. (p. 178)

The question of what possibilities are open to the writer … before the advent of a society in permanent revolution, is … explored by Simone de Beauvoir in Les Mandarins. Reflecting the increasing sense of loss and isolation felt by the intellectual left as the post-war years slipped into the Cold War era, her novel strikes a note of cynicism…. Perhaps the most...